Who'd have guessed? In a summer of threequels, giant robots, rat chefs, amnesiac spies, and The Simpsons family, it is the duo of Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen that will walk away the real champs. Knocked Up started the summer off with a bang, and now Superbad - which Apatow produced and Rogen wrote - ends the summer on an even higher note.Superbad sounds like many a teen comedy: a single day in the life of high school seniors looking to lose their virginity before graduation. Indeed, many of the plot points are straight out of other films: the two leads, Seth and Evan (Jonah Hill and Michael Cera), need to buy the booze for the party in order to impress their respective crushes. They enlist their friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who has a fake ID, to get the alcohol. From there their night is filled with many misadventures. In short, this could easily be a pretty generic movie. Yet somehow it is able to overcome the plot to be probably the best, most sincere, and funniest teen comedy since American Pie.
What makes it all work is a script that understands high schoolers. That could be a result of the fact that Seth Rogen and co-writer Evan Goldberg first wrote the screenplay when they were in high school. These characters aren't high school stereotypes, but recognizable people. I don't know about you, but my high school didn't have nearly as defined cliques as John Hughes might lead you to believe. Yes there were nerds, yes there were preps, yes there were jocks, but there were also a lot of people who just were. They weren't popular, but they weren't losers either. That gray area is where Seth and Evan exist. They get picked on by people of higher status, but then in turn are held up in comparison to other characters. Not taking the characters to an extreme is what makes it so relatable, and so funny.
It also helps that it's really about something, not just getting drunk and having sex. At the core of Superbad is one of the best examinations of a friendship I've seen in a teen film. Seth and Evan aren't going to the same college after graduation, and you can tell from the beginning of the film that they're very uncomfortable about that, though they don't know how to broach the subject with each other. They've been friends since elementary school, and they aren't sure if their friendship can survive such a big hurdle. The ways in which the two come to terms with their impending separation is surprisingly touching and at times bittersweet, and it is this element that shines above all others.
Because the friendship aspect is so important, two really strong actors were needed. Hill and Cera do a great job of making you believe they've been friends for years. Hill can be a bit one-note at times, often going over the top. Yet Cera is able to reign him in every time with his subdued, subtler work. Indeed, Cera's Evan really is the funniest character in the movie, though you'd probably not be able to quote his lines like you might with the other characters. Instead, the laughs with him come from the smallest things, like way he looks at things, the way he walks, or the way he reacts to the world around him. The third member of the gang is Fogell, aka McLovin. A lot of people have already proclaimed him the funniest character of the summer. The hype isn't totally warranted, but he is still quite amusing. Had the McLovin jokes not been revealed in trailers, he might have seemed a lot more fresh than he came off as. Still, his story of getting booze for his friends could have felt like a major tangent to the film had newcomer Christopher Mintz-Plasse not been able to handle it so well, so he deserves some recognition for that.
But above all else, this is a comedy, and a very funny one. I'd say it's probably funnier than Knocked Up was, although it could be close. Even the opening and closing credits are handled in a very funny way. And often the humor is unexpected in that the film never repeat the same kinds of jokes. They hit us with a gross out joke, then hit us with an over-the-top fantasy sequence, then make us laugh at a silly childhood flashback. The film is constantly flowing and surprising, rarely allowing us to guess what jokes could come next. It all works really well, with the disparate jokes never feeling too out of place or contrasting in styles to each other.
While I liked the movie more for its examination of teenage friendship than for its story of a booze search, I can't deny that it all worked very well and I was never bored. Hopefully this doesn't turn into a franchise like American Pie did (the opportunity is clearly there). But then again, Apatow and Rogen have been consistently surprising us for almost a decade now, and if anyone could be trusted to make a sequel that is actually warranted, it'd probably be these guys.
